"Playoffs?!?!": A Reply to Garnet and Black Attack's Modest Proposal (Part I)
by T Kyle King
on May 14, 2008 10:04 PM EDT
in Football
You know how I love a good playoff argument.
I’ve been stating my case against a Division I-A playoff since I first started participating in the blogosphere. I thoroughly enjoy going ’round and ’round (and ’round and ’round) upon the subject. I have no patience whatsoever for state legislators, college presidents, or U.S. Congressmen who abuse their positions to agitate for a playoff.
Self-serving politicians pandering to the baser aspects of their constituents’ presumed beliefs, though, are fair game for cheap shots; the right to criticize them openly, without inhibitions or pulled punches, quite literally lies at the heart of the free speech and free press guarantees of the First Amendment. When a thoughtful blogger treads into the defining mine field of college football fandom, however, he deserves a more measured and articulate response.
This brings me to Garnet and Black Attack, the SB Nation South Carolina Gamecocks weblog whose proprietor has gone fishin’ after a fine week’s worth of work in the form of his two-part proposal for a Division I-A football tournament.
If you haven’t read both parts, go read them in their entirety. I will quote liberally from them, but they warrant your full consideration, so you should not rely solely upon the excerpts I provide.
Brandon---I’m not outing him there; he tells you his real name up front---effectively rebuts some pro-playoff canards by debunking the myth of the "mythical" national championship, noting the relative novelty of playoff systems, reiterating the inevitable diminution of regular-season games under a playoff system, and underscoring the certainty of mission creep.
Brandon then begins to take on some of the familiar arguments in opposition to a playoff, offering, in the style of a formal debate, the following resolution for our consideration: "PROPOSED: That college football fans agree to the following debunking of the arguments of playoff opponents." Unsurprisingly, I take issue with some of these, and I will begin (though not end) my response by taking up the first of these this evening.
Brandon begins:
No. No, it doesn’t.
It didn't in 2003, when Southern Cal should have played LSU. It didn't in 2004, when Auburn should have played Southern Cal. Time after time, the BCS has failed to present the No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup, and has to be bailed out by the top-ranked team, a scenario that proved impossible in 2003, when the top-ranked team wasn't even in the national championship game.
The BCS has broken the hearts of almost as many college football fans as erratic quarterbacks, and with less justification for the end result. And every heartbreak has created an endless stream of changes to the formula: take this computer out, put this one in, throw out this poll, add this one in, change this weighting, put in strength of schedule, take out strength of schedule...
There might be a way to have a No. 1 vs. No. 2 system. The BCS isn't it. It never has been; it never will be.
I will grant that no conscientious person could (and I certainly will not) claim that the B.C.S. invariably has produced the correct championship game pairing---a goal which I, as a fan of the traditional bowl tie-ins, deem of dubious desirability in the first place---but I will continue to insist that the B.C.S., without exception, has produced the correct national championship result.
If we accept as a working definition of "best team" the notion that the team that acquits itself most impressively over the course of an entire season has earned the right to be called the national champion, then Tennessee, the only major-conference unbeaten, was the best team in 1998. Florida State, the only major-conference unbeaten, was the best team in 1999. Oklahoma, the only major-conference unbeaten, was the best team in 2000. Miami (Florida), the only major-conference unbeaten, was the best team in 2001.
The truth of the foregoing assertions, which I offer as statements of what I believe to be incontrovertible fact, is not undermined by the reality (which I also accept as a given) that Oregon, and not Nebraska, should have received the other Rose Bowl invitation opposite the Hurricanes at the end of the 2001 campaign. However, that Miami squad annihilated the Cornhuskers by a 37-14 final margin in Pasadena; no college team would have beaten the ‘Canes that night. There are a couple or three N.F.L. teams that wouldn’t have beaten the ‘Canes that night.
I don’t know whether Georgia would have beaten Miami in the Fiesta Bowl at the end of the 2002 campaign, but Ohio State, the only major-conference unbeaten, was the best team that season. The split title of 2003 between the only two major-conference once-beatens was the most accurate result, in spite of the fact that Oklahoma had no business being in the Sugar Bowl.
Such also is the case in 2004. Yes, the Plainsmen, and not the Sooners, should have been awarded the Orange Bowl berth versus the Trojans, but the Southern California squad that pulverized previously unbeaten Oklahoma in a game that wasn’t even as close as the 55-19 score indicated wouldn’t have lost to Auburn, even though the Tigers likely would have given U.S.C. a better game.
The Rose Bowl showdown between the only two major-conference unbeatens at the end of the 2005 campaign produced an undisputed, and indisputable, national champion in Texas. For all the wailing and gnashing of teeth about the 2006 national title tilt, Florida proved in the desert, and Michigan proved in the Rose Bowl, that the right result was reached. Last year, although Oklahoma deserved the bowl bid that went to Ohio State, Louisiana State earned the right to call itself the 2007 national champion.
Garbage in, garbage out? Not necessarily; whatever one may think of the B.C.S. system---and I, for one, do not care for determining college football bowl match-ups using a formula that seems to combine the conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit with the worksheet for determining child support under the current Georgia statutory guidelines---the end results have been right.
Even those who believe the foregoing assertion represents too strong a statement, though, have to admit that, whatever the B.C.S.’s flaws, at least this much could be said with a straight face:
Every B.C.S. national champion has had a plausible argument for being the best team in college football that year. Even if another team also had an argument, that argument boiled down to "we deserved it, too" (or, more likely, as in the case of Oregon in 2001 or Auburn in 2004, "we deserved our shot") rather than "they didn’t deserve it." You may think L.S.U. or U.S.C. deserved it more in 2003, but you can’t seriously claim that U.S.C. or L.S.U. didn’t deserve it at all.
Other sports---playoff sports---are a different story, however. No one honestly could claim that the 1997 Florida Marlins or the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals were the best team in major league baseball, that the 2007 Oregon State Beavers were the best team in college baseball, that the 2007-’08 New York Giants were the best team in the N.F.L., or that the 2007-’08 Georgia Bulldogs were the best basketball team in the S.E.C. . . . but, by golly, those are the incongruous, cognitively-dissonant results each of those tournaments turned out, leaving playoff proponents in a very shaky glass house from which to hurl stones at the Bowl Championship Series.
Criticize the B.C.S. if you must, but know that, in comparison to any playoff format ever devised, such animadversions essentially equate to Winston Churchill’s denunciation of democracy.
To be continued. . . .
Go ‘Dawgs!
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Awsome
Very, very well done. I want to take this blog to meet my parents.
I couldn’t agree more. The BCS is not perfect but as whole it has accomplished its mission statement. There will always be teams that say they deserved their shot, even in a playoff. Teams left out of the 4,8, 12 (what have you) playoff will be questioning why they didn’t get their shot. Again, well done.
by deanpat92 on May 15, 2008 10:16 AM EDT 0 recs
No No A Thousand Times No
The split title of 2003 between the only two major-conference once-beatens was the most accurate result, in spite of the fact that Oklahoma had no business being in the Sugar Bowl.
I’m not a playoff proponent by any means (I fall into the “blow it up and return of the good ol’ days” camp), but that’s simply incorrect. If Oklahoma had no business being in the game (and they didn’t), then why couldn’t we get USC (who was #1 in both polls at the end of the regular season) against LSU? The winner of that game would unquestionably be the champion of all non-panhandled areas of the nation. That would be the most accurate result.
To say, “we had three once-beatens, two survived their bowl games, crown ‘em” is precisely the reason the BCS doesn’t work. If you put a system together to avoid the 1990/1991/1997 controversies, it damn well better fix those controversies.
Otherwise, bravo.
by Hawkeye State on May 15, 2008 10:52 AM EDT 0 recs
More Good Football
Ignoring everything else, a playoff provides the chance to see more games of the nation’s elite playing against each other. In the BCS/bowl system, we get to see each team play a maximum of one more game. In a playoff, we get to see the playoff teams who move on play multiple games.
More than anything else, what I like most about college football is watching good games. I don’t care about parade floats on Colorado Blvd. I don’t care about the Egg Bowl or the Iron Bowl if one of the teams has a losing record. I loved watching Florida beat FSU 45-12 last year, but I will treasure the memory of 2004’s 20-13 win more because it was a much better game.
The post season is the best chance we have to pair up the nation’s elite because we’ve just had a whole regular season to figure out who the elite are. We should be taking advantage of that to try to set up a lot of great games.
If a BCS game turns out to be a big mismatch (i.e. Georgia versus Hawaii or Illinois versus USC), then too bad. That’s it; they’re done and there’s no way to get one more good game out of them. If a playoff game turns out to be a big mismatch, at least we get another chance to match up teams because there’s more than one round of games.
You can argue championships till you turn blue (and some have). More than anything, I want more matchups of elite teams. The BCS puts a 1-game cap on those elite teams at the end of the year, depriving fans of the chance to see more good football.
by Year2 on May 15, 2008 3:53 PM EDT 0 recs
Binary Opposition
In most areas of life, I’m interested in nuance, balance, the grey areas, but in this case, I chuck all that out of the window for a binary opposition. Equally, I cannot accept an analogy of the BCS to democracy, because the BCS is inherently more crapulous than either of two perfectly valid alternatives.
You can either declare a national champion by fiat, to overcome the lack of competition and statistical comparability between the top teams separated by conference, or you can structure a competition to have them win the championship based on the results on the field. I have a preference, but both have compelling features. Fundamentally, a subjective approach gets interesting match-ups in the hopes of having a consensus national champion, and a playoff gets you a clear path to a champion based on results within a rationalized and consisten structure.
The BCS, by contrast, rests on turning a series of comparisons into a series of numbers, and using that number to define who might be selected. That number includes subjective factors such as rankings which reflect any number of cognitive problems. It’s an approach that relies on a false confidence in the numbers, and it fails to produce a consistently robust result. You can’t guarantee that the BCS will result in a championship game that people buy into.
There is no, repeat no, reason to assume that a playoff system has to include any group of teams other than the most elite. The fact that Kyle can cite teams that, on paper, don’t “deserve” to be champions is more reflective of playoff structures based on a broad net that was designed to increase revenue through more games. The notion that teams could complain about not getting their shot is an artifact of the inherent subjectivity of the existing system.
Kyle’s use of the phrase “cognitively dissonant” to refer to results such as the Giants winning the Super Bowl is indicative of why I think a change in the method for identifying a National Champion has to be either rationalized entirely, or not at all. You can argue that the NFL takes too many teams into the playoffs, which is fine, but you cannot argue that the Giants won the championship game. What else are they supposed to do, in order to be Champions? The point of competitions is not to validate that the best team on paper is the best team in practice, the point of competition is to see which team wins. Period.
If you want a structure that produces a champion, there is nothing exceptional about college football that prevents you from having a playoff, aside from some oligopolistic practices surrounding the conference structures.
If you think that something other than results on the field should be used to determine a national champion, then don’t bother with a playoff – and don’t bother with the BCS, because it doesn’t produce “the most interesting” matchups, and it doesn’t offset for fluke losses, or any of the innumerable considerations that could be applied to setting up interesting bowl games and then selecting a champion as a result.
I can’t emphasize enough that I could live with either of the opposed alternatives I suggest. If I cannot have a systematic process for a championship, at least let’s have some interesting games. The BCS doesn’t get either of those things, so it can safely be consigned to the scrap heap of history.
by DC Trojan on May 15, 2008 4:39 PM EDT 0 recs
Have playoffs; limit the field
I should go ahead and disclose that I am actually a playoff advocate, but I take seriously the warnings and arguments provided by anti-playoff fans. I agre that if a playoff system is not careful, they can diminish the regular season. But, i personally would prefer to see equally deserving teams play for a title rather than the talking heads making the decision for me. For a game with such high emotions, how we can let the champion be influenced by perception rather than than strictly what’s on the playing field. This is important because teams like USC that have clear media favoritism will have an advantage over lesser known teams.
The playoff dud examples provided by this post highlight the dangers of having a playoff field too large. If one limits the field to 4-8 teams, then one would be hard pressed to find an “undeserving” champion, because in the worst-case scenario that team would only have 1 or 2 losses, same as our last BCS champ. In addition, limiting the field would ensure a spirited regular season for those few spots (teams with more than 2 losses could simply forget about it, and even teams with one or 2 losses would not necessarily be safe).
Finally, I have a problem with the argument above because it assumes the outcome to hypothetical games. Example: USC beats Auburn in 2003. Really? How come? Didn’t we all think Miami would beat the tar out of OSU in 2002? Had we not actually watched that game, we would have assumed a Miami victory. So, assuming the outcomes of games that haven’t happened is a little silly. What i learned last year is that no team is safe, no matter how good they may look on a certain week they can certainly be vulnerable against a certain team. I would have much preferred seeing USC beat OU and then Auburn that year in a playoff system to call them the unquestioned champs.
by MattP. on May 17, 2008 1:41 PM EDT 0 recs
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